Story Time
by OliveTheOlive
Summary: Conan is sick of elementary school and Haibara is as paranoid as ever. A prequel to The Clock Tower.


Conan sat through a lesson on simple addition for what felt like the hundredth time.

"Whenever you add one to something, you just count up one more number. So if you have three, you count up to four."

In reality, it was probably only the thirtieth.

"So then, what would one plus one be, class?" asked the smiling teacher from the front of the room.

"Niii!" his classmates shouted, beaming back at her.

Conan wondered if grade-school teachers would _ever_ tire of that pun. Out of sixty or so first- and second-grade teachers, he'd had over the years, at least twenty of them had used it, and it was apparently still fashionable.

It was times like this that he hated Haibara's guts. With a passion. She had stopped bothering with school years ago, pointing out that it wasn't necessary to "keep up appearances" if she just stayed in her lab all day, which she preferred to do most of the time, anyway, alternating between stretches of apathy and periods of intense experimentation, frenetically searching night and day for an answer. When she did go outside, she just disguised herself as _him,_ keeping up the neighbors' impression that only one child lived at their residence. Of course, the neighbors were sure that there was also an adult, but she kept to herself – she never went out of the house. Still, one could talk to her by phone or by calling at the front gate with the intercom system. No one knew what she looked like, but while unusual, and while there were rumors that she was a gamer, a virtual reality addict, it wasn't completely unheard of to run across people who shut themselves away like that, so no one thought too much of it, and by the time anyone thought to get better acquainted with their reserved neighbors, the house was very quickly empty, and Conan and Ai had moved on to another neighborhood. They did this just about every two years, and it enabled them to avoid all the strange questions that would crop up if someone noticed that Conan was getting no older while his classmates grew up alongside him.

Unfortunately, that meant that Conan still had to repeat the same two grades over and over again, and now he had to do it without anyone to suffer alongside him. He could have always made Haibara take a turn going back to grade-school now and again, but he never did, partly out of concern for her and partly because he didn't think he could stand being cooped up inside for as long as she usually was.

Plus, what if some well-meaning teacher noticed how sleep-deprived she was and demanded to talk to a parent, face-to-face? Maybe that was paranoid, but perhaps not. Conan had tried to get Haibara to take better care of herself, with little success. When the spirit seized her she worked all hours, only stopping when she passed out in front of her computer.

But more than either of them would admit, the reason that Conan made himself go to school and Haibara shut herself in and worked herself to exhaustion was that they couldn't admit defeat. It was true that Haibara still hadn't found a permanent antidote, but if she kept trying she might, someday. Just because she hadn't succeeded yet didn't mean that she never would, and both of them refused to truly accept the possibility that they were stuck like this forever. She had nearly given up many times, but she always went back to working before long. She usually pretended that these lapses in ambition, which occurred at least every two years with some reliability, had never happened at all, and Conan did not generally bring up the topic either.

"Ah, guess what time it is, everyone?" bubbled Conan's obnoxiously sweet teacher. "It's story time! Now, let's all make a circle, okay?"

Making a circle took a considerable amount of time. Maybe the kids were no more interested in story time than Conan was, despite their outward show of enthusiasm.

There had been a day when Conan had not minded story-time. Often, it was by far the most tolerable part of the day, even if all the stories were aimed at six- and seven-year-olds. But more recently, it was just as bad as everything else. It wasn't like most of his teachers could tell a good story anyway, so now, Conan just let his mind wander during story-time in much the way that it wandered throughout the rest of the school day.

He was just starting to let his attention ebb away when a hand shot up somewhere across the circle. Without waiting to be called on, the girl with her arm in the air said:

"Sensei, can you tell us any mystery stories?"

The teacher hesitated. A dismayed expression flitted across her face, before she settled back into her reliable, fake smile.

"We're going to be reading a different story today."

"But why not?" Conan spoke up without really meaning to. "Couldn't we read a mystery story today?"

"But I've already decided what story to read," said the teacher, looking serenely down at him. "I've already picked it out."

The little girl slackened just slightly, lowering her arm and trying not to look disappointed. As the teacher began speaking again, Conan also noticed that the girl was tuning out the story just as much as he was. Her name was Ikawa Aki, and she was one of the ones who had been trying very hard to attach herself to Conan ever since he got here. He hadn't known anything about her liking mystery stories. He combed his memory for some incident where he might have talked about Sherlock Holmes with any of these kids. He was fairly sure it hadn't happened with this class yet…

After what Conan called an hour and his watch called fifteen minutes, the story ended and the teacher released the fidgeting children from the circle to get ready to leave. Most of them scrambled up to get their things, while others were slower, lagging behind. Conan was among the latter group, having barely heard anything the teacher had said. He slowly stood up, watching a few of the boys talking exuberantly about a new virtual game.

"Do you also like mystery stories?" asked a voice from his right. He jumped, and looked around to see Aki looking hopefully at him.

"Yeah, a little. I like Sherlock Holmes."

"Really?" she breathed, eyes wide. Little kids could be awfully excitable. If he'd learned nothing else, he'd learned to never underestimate the sheer potential of energy in them. "Then do you want to be a detective when you grow up?" she bubbled. "That would be so cool!"

"Yeah," he said slowly, keeping the irony out of his voice as best as he could. "I do want to be a detective." And to grow up.

The girl's face lit up. "You should meet my obaa-chan, then! She did detective stuff when she was a kid, and she tells the best stories. She's picking me up, I'll introduce you!"

"Um, well…" Conan was a bit reluctant to let anyone get too attached to him, and he certainly did not want to establish any kind of a connection with an adult who might get curious about his whereabouts later.

But Aki wasn't listening. She dashed for her things, grabbing Conan's as well, and proceeded to drag him bodily out of the room. Once outside, she broke into a run, with Conan stumbling close behind her, only letting go of his hand in her attempt to tackle her poor grandmother to the ground. Fortunately, Aki's obaa-chan stood her ground pretty well. The old woman just laughed and swept her granddaughter into the air. Conan stood back, feeling awkward.

"Obaa-chan! You have to meet my friend. He likes detective stories, too!"

Recognizing his opening, he piped up: "Nice to meet you, Ikawa-san!" he chirped in his best little-kid voice.

"Nice to meet you." Her face settled into a kindly smile. She was a small woman, but she was full of energy, just like her granddaughter. "What's your name?"

"Akechi Conan." He wasn't all that creative. His name changed, but not by much. He usually called himself Conan. It might have made him easier to track, but he needed one name that he could keep, and he couldn't bear to call himself by his real one. Not while he was like this.

"Conan? You – that's an unusual name, isn't it?"

"My parents are fans of Sherlock Holmes," he said cheerfully.

No further explanation seemed to be needed. "Of course! Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!"

"Will you tell us detective stories?" demanded Aki.

Her grandmother smiled at her. "Of course. Do you want to hear them, Conan-kun? If it's alright with your parents, why don't you come over and have a snack, too?"

He considered it. After weighing a lot of variables and running through a whole host of possible ways this could end terribly, his mental process devolved to a simple "Why not?" He smiled and said:

"Okay! I'll tell them." He whipped out his phone, and with a few taps on the screen, sent Haibara a message to reply to him in a couple of minutes.

The lady looked like she wanted to object to "telling" his parents, rather than "asking", but she seemed to brush it off. She led them out of the playground, chatting with Aki about school and telling stories. She was a wonderful storyteller. Conan found himself listening to her with great interest as she told a story with a thief character that might have been adapted from Arsene Lupin, although the story itself wasn't one he had read or heard before.

He felt almost guilty when his phone beeped and interrupted the story. It was just the expected text from Haibara, of course. He told Aki and her grandmother that it was his parents and that they said it was fine for him to go to Aki's obaa-san's house, and the story continued, finishing just as they reached the house.

Aki's grandmother's house was a very cute little place, only down the street from the school, a small, old-fashioned Western-style place. It was a light, airy blue, with very pretty lavender trim. Once they were inside, Conan noted that the tables and bookshelves were covered with books, cute knick-knacks, and digital picture frames. He was rather impressed at how cluttered a space could look so neat.

They had lapsed into comfortable silence as the story ended, but Aki broke it as they slipped off their shoes.

"Could you tell us one about you next?" she persisted. "From when you were a little girl?"

Her grandmother smiled. "Why don't we have our snack first?" she said brightly.

Food was an instant distraction. Aki bounced down the hall, presumably headed to the kitchen. Conan followed at a walk, earning him a strange look from her grandmother. It bothered him, sometimes, that even after all these years, he could never find the right balance between being rude and acting so polite that all the adults thought he was just weird. He deliberately ate his cheese and crackers as inelegantly as he could to make up for it.

The snack proved to be only a temporary distraction, however.

"Obaa-chan? Now will you tell us a story about you and your friends?"

Ikawa-san patted her mouth with her napkin. "Go wash up first, and use the toilet. And wash your hands afterwards." Ikawa-san was obviously a master at this game. "Conan-kun can help me look for my old journals that I kept at the time. Right, Conan-kun?"

"Sure." Conan looked curiously up at the old woman, wiping his mouth with his own napkin. Too late, he realized that he really hadn't been messy enough with the applesauce. Aki's chin was covered with the stuff, and she had some cracker crumbs sticking to the corner of her mouth.

Aki pouted, but padded off to the bathroom in her slippers.

"We'll just leave the dishes until later, alright Conan-kun?" Ikawa-san smiled at him and helped him down from his chair. She moved back through the hall into the living room. Conan trailed after her, pausing to crane his neck back to look up at a picture fram hung on the wall. As he watched, it faded from an image of a very happy baby to a picture of a traditional wedding. It must have been Ikawa-san's wedding day, but it was too high up for him to get a very good look. He entered the living room.

She was already sitting in an armchair with a photo album when he walked in. She leafed through it quickly, tearing through page after page, and stopped abruptly as she found whatever she was looking for. Her wrinkled old eyes flickered up to him and back to the album.

"Conan-kun," she said slowly. "Do you know what my name was before I got married?"

Conan stared a bit. She was acting very peculiar…

"No. What was it?" He was every inch the curious child on the outside, and fairly curious behind that as well. Not even sixty years could take a detective's curiosity from him.

"Yoshida."

Yoshida? Oh _crap,_ if she was in her sixties, that would've made her…

"You're the same person as Edogawa-kun, aren't you?" she asked quietly. "But you should be a _lot_ older. You look exactly the same as you did sixty years ago. Edogawa was a fake name, so is Akechi, and Conan probably is if the other two are."

Conan found himself speechless before the sixty-eight-year-old Yoshida Ayumi.

"You're lucky I've been calling you Edogawa-kun in my stories!" said Ayumi. "Imagine if Aki had come over and told me that one of the Detective Boys was in her class! How did this even happen?"

"It's… a long story?" he eventually managed to stammer. There was no way to talk himself out of this situation, so he figured he might as well admit it.

She smiled. "Well, I'm retired, and it seems to me that you probably have all the time in the world." She carefully closed the album. "I think I'll tell her the story of the booby-trapped mansion. Play along and pretend you know nothing about it."

_Which_ booby-trapped mansion, he wondered, remembering one too many investigations of "haunted" houses. He nodded, just as Aki bounded into the room, demanding to finally be told the story. As Ayumi embarked on the tale (the one about Samizu Kichemon's house and Kid and the diamond, he realized) he couldn't help but struggle to take everything in. Ayumi had a grandchild. She was old, had lived a full life. Chances are, so had Genta and Mitsuhiko. And probably, so had Ran.

He tried not to think about Ran. She reminded him too much of his old life, that he could never have. He felt frozen in time, unable to move forward while everything fell further away from him. Ran had slipped away, Ayumi had grandchildren, Agasa had passed away, and so had Shinichi's parents. Hattori was an old man, a famous detective, and they hadn't spoken in decades, and the break in communication was entirely Conan's fault. Hattori probably thought he was dead.

It was a couple of barely-heard stories later that Ayumi looked up at the clock and exclaimed that she needed to get Aki home, and that Conan's parents "must be so worried!" She hustled them out the door. Conan deliberately took as long as possible to put his shoes back on, discreetly sending Haibara another message:

[An old friend recognized me

I think you might like to meet them.

Mind if I bring them by?]

He wondered how she would react. It could be rather entertaining, provided she wasn't too heavily armed.

"Conan-kun, hurry up!" called Aki from the porch.

"I'm coming. You're a lot like your obaa-san, Ikawa-chan," he hollered back.

Ayumi stuck her head through the door. "Is that a compliment?" she asked, amused. "Or do I have something to be concerned about?"

"A compliment," he chirped, and slipped outside into the late afternoon light, racing Aki to the sidewalk.

They walked to Aki's house to drop her off. Ayumi told Aki that she couldn't come inside today, she had to go meet an old friend and was in a hurry, but to say hi to Mommy and Daddy for her. Aki said goodbye to them and raced up the walk to her house.

"So, going to tell me this long story of yours?" asked Ayumi brightly. It was a bit disconcerting to see the similarities between the Ayumi of sixty years ago and the Ayumi of now. She smiled in exactly the same way, was just the same shade of cheerful.

"Nothing fazes you, does it?" He turned and they walked down the street.

"When you're as old as I am, not much does." She gave him a wry smile.

Conan laughed. It wasn't an entirely happy laugh – it was too harsh and too hollow. But he couldn't help himself. Ayumi looked at him with an almost worried expression. She had probably never heard that kind of a laugh come from such a young face.

"I'm older than you," he pointed out when he recovered. "And it isn't your age: you've always been this way."

"Have I?"

"You have."

"One of my better qualities, I guess. I knew it was a keeper. So how old _are_ you?"

Conan started to think about it, and then decided that he'd rather not. "Ten years older than you." He carefully refrained from looking at her as he said it.

"So about seventy-eight?"

"Let's keep it at ten years older than you," he grumbled. He still partly thought of himself as sixteen, no matter how much time had passed, and in a sense, he was. One did not mature much when stuck in a body ten years too young.

"Did you just stop growing at six?"

"I shrunk at sixteen."

She stared. "Shrunk?"

"Shrunk," he repeated.

"That's a new one." She shook her head, as if to clear it. "How exactly did you shrink?"

"Long story short? Someone tried to poison me, the poison wasn't very well tested, and there was an unexpected side effect." He turned a corner onto a side street and continued. "It wasn't until about a year later that I realized I wasn't growing either. A couple years after that, I was forced to leave the country and assume a different identity for a few years. There would have been questions if I had stayed."

Ayumi nodded thoughtfully. "Then why did you come back?"

He shrugged. "I like Japan better. And travel is difficult when you aren't a real person, with a passport. I could manage it then, but only by relying on others. Agasa helped me a lot, and so did my parents- they had a lot of connections. Traveling like that would be impossible for me now."

"I see." They were silent for a moment.

"By the way, where are we going?"

"Well…" Conan hesitated. "That depends." He wasn't sure just how much Haibara would freak out about him bringing someone to their house.

Speaking of the devil, his phone beeped. He pulled it out, unfolding it with a shake of his wrist. Haibara had been fairly concise.

[Of course.

Which house slippers do they need?]

He smiled a little. It was a color-coded system they'd come up with years ago. Their way of asking "friend or foe?" without anyone else knowing. Haibara did not allow mistakes, miscommunication, or any kind of breach in security. And she didn't waste breath asking questions she knew he didn't feel like answering.

He kept his reply even shorter, sketching "blue" on the screen and hitting send in a couple of seconds. He pocketed the phone and met Ayumi's curious gaze.

"We're going to my house," he informed her.

"Oh. Alright then."

They lapsed into silence. The street they were on was quiet. You could hear the air traffic, far overhead. The sky was turning a gilded red in the west, and the shadows lengthened around them. Conan turned up the walk to one of the biggest houses in the neighborhood.

"Oh! But that's the professor's house next door, isn't it?" said Ayumi, excited. Agasa's old house had been thoroughly renovated before his death, but it was falling apart again. So was the Kudou house, but they managed. They really needed to do something about that, but they couldn't even be living in this neighborhood more than once every ten years without someone noticing, and hiring anyone to fix things without raising suspicion, was complicated, to say the least. They did as much maintenance as they could by themselves, but that wasn't going to keep these buildings from collapsing on their heads twenty years from now.

"Yeah, we were neighbors. That's how I knew him." He pulled out a key, unlocked the door, and ushered Ayumi inside.

"I'm home!" he called out. There was no reply. Haibara had probably locked herself in the basement again, which she had staked out as her lab. He warned Ayumi to watch her head. Some of the lights hung low. He had barely gone two steps toward the basement stairs, however, when a small white-coated figure emerged from them, one hand resting comfortably in a bulging pocket. "Oh, there you are." He relaxed, but only slightly. She was obviously armed. "I thought you might blow up the house or something as soon as you saw someone unfamiliar walk in."

"Of course not. Explosions attract too much attention. Who is she?" Haibara narrowed her eyes at the old woman.

"Ai-chan? Is that you?" For a second, Ayumi looked as if she hadn't aged a day, and the wrinkles were all for show.

Ai relaxed immediately. "It is." She removed the gun from her pocket and set it on the hallway table. "Ayumi-chan, right? It's good to see you again."

Conan spluttered. "Wait. How in the world did you recognize her so quickly?"

"I didn't," Haibara said simply. "But who else calls me 'Ai-chan'?"


End file.
